Life is all about decisions – those thousands of decisions that we take every single day. And luck – lots of luck in a world of randomness and serendipity. A life-skill I have written about before “Luckily I am so lucky“. Let me muse about that other skill – decision-making. Basically, it should work like this: To make reliably good decisions, you simply weigh how right you think you are against how sorry you will be if you turn out to be wrong. Whether you should take a risk depends not just on the probability that you are right but also on the consequences if you are wrong. That sounds simple enough, right? But there is a small mental hurdle called ‘regret’.

Regret-Minimization

I personally know a lot of people – myself included – who ultimately made big life decisions largely based on the path of least regret. These decisions are almost always described as the best decisions they’ve ever made. Go figure....